The Wind From Hastings Read Free

group was
tall and fair, with the blunt features of a pure Saxon. His clothes were almost excessively fine, intended to awe the commonfolk, and no man so splendid looking had ridden in at our gate in my memory.
    It still shames me to realize that I was so impressed by his appearance I forgot everything else; while my world was being destroyed I was gawking at a velvet tunic and a plumed hat. And part of my mind was not even on the man, but on the possibilities of using that gorgeous plume in my own hairdress!
    My mother’s moan of anguish broke the spell. I turned to her, and the expression on her face was enough to knock the giddy girlishness right out of me. She shoved me aside and ran down the steps to stand with my father, her hand clinging white-knuckled to his arm. Edwin, usually brash and outspoken, stood quite subdued on my father’s other side. His eyes were fixed on the face of the man with the plume; they all listened with dreadful attention to the herald’s final words.
    â€œTherefore, by order of the Witan for Our Sovereign Edward, in this Year of Our Lord 1055, let it be known to all men that Aelfgar, son of Leofric of Merica, is outlawed from this day, is relieved of his Earldom and must give over immediately to his Sovereign Lord all his holdings and possessions.”
    Even to a girl that was plain enough. Outlawed! In our own courtyard, embraced by familiar walls and with the fens growing green all around us, we were suddenly dispossessed! The bluebells and primroses piled in baskets to trim the Maypole were no longer mine. The crusty loaves of bread in the ovens, my dear little merlin on her perch in the falconry, perhaps even the contents of my clothes chest—all of these belonged now to the King!
    I had missed hearing the charge, but I understood the sentence all too clearly. The sight of my father’s grayed face and my mother’s stricken eyes made it unbearable;
I twisted away from the door and ran mindless to my chamber.
    It was just a small room, let into the timbered wall of the hall, but it held much that was dear to me. My goosedown pallet with its warm woolen blankets; the carved clothes chest that had contained my lady mother’s dowry; the combs and trinkets and pots of creams that had begun to interest me more than children’s games. My chamber had no door to protect me, only a woven hanging suspended from a rod. Fear and shame came right in with me and attacked me as I lay huddled on my bed.
    The daughter of a great earl was a safe and protected person, with servants and clothes and a way of life made comfortable by her father’s power.
    But what could happen to the daughter of an outlaw? We would have to leave the fens, leave England itself, flee to some strange and distant place, be poor and humble … It was too horrible!
    â€œDisgraced!” I cried to myself. “Outlawed! How could he do this to me?! It’s time for the May Day, young men will be coming to dance with me, a prince might have offered for me … Oh, Father, how could you do this!”
    It was so enormous I could scarce conceive of it. The only scandal in our family, at least the only one I had ever heard about, had been caused by my grandmother. A lady famous for her beauty, she was wed to the great Earl Leofric of Mercia, and was much admired by noble and vassal alike. When Leofric levied an excessively heavy tax on his subjects, my grandmother, the Lady Godiva, took their side. In jest, he told her he would abolish the tax on the day she rode naked through the town.
    My grandmother must have been as stubborn as she was beautiful. To the Earl’s dismay, she took his joke as a challenge and announced that she would, indeed, ride naked through Coventry, covered only by the fall of her unbound hair. She insisted that that would be
enough protection for a righteous woman, but my realistic grandfather was well aware that even the lightest breeze would lift the red-gold locks